How to Have a 46 Hour Birthday

A German man has bent time to his will, somehow traversing international time zones to make his birthday last a staggering 46 hours. For him, birthdays presumably aren't a time of sadness and regret that are best got through as quickly as possible while hoping no one notices or remembers or makes a fuss. But then he's only 26.

The new haver of the longest birthday ever according the Guinness Organisation is Sven Hagemeier, a man who beat the previous longest birthday of 35 hours 25min by spending nearly two entire days on aeroplanes, enjoying films and eating peanuts to mark the momentous occasion. The trick to enjoying a long birthday seems to be to start and end on different sides of the International Date line, the dividing line between days that splits the Pacific between Russia and the US.

Using this method, Hagemeier was able to enjoy his two-dayer with relative ease, first taking flights from New Zealand to Australia, then heading out to Hawaii where a new day started and he was 26 all over again. He didn't exactly lap the world to beat time itself, he just hung around in a few airports in the South Pacific, a record anyone could equal with a couple of grand and a passport. [Guinness World Records]